Wow! Did we worked hard for this release ! We released the first alpha version of ImpressCMS 1.1 nearly 4 months ago and after intensive development, testing and debugging, the latest stable release of our award winning Community Management System is finally out!

Ok, so now we can relax and rest for the next couple of months ? Hell no! ImpressCMS 1.1 Final is indeed our most impressive release so far, but trust me, “You ain’t seen nothing yet !”

Starting this Monday, we will be hard at work finishing the roadmap for the up coming 1.2 release. If 1.1 was all about adding the features, security layers and nice goodies that should have been in there 2 years ago, 1.2 will be all about optimisation and user experience! But don’t worry, we still reserve you a few nice features along the way which you have now come to expect in your favorite CMS!

Ok, but what about the Project itself ?

Product development is one thing, but there are so much more in an open source project. It’s definitely not all about the code! It really is about the people using the product, the people thinking on how to ease other people’s life, people who support others, it’s about an entire community building together a project that will bring people together, solve problems, achieve greatness, and provide fun all along the road !

So what have we done as a community lately ? Well, we already know that ImpressCMS has a dedicated community among which a few people are working nearly every day to constantly improve the project. We call these people the ImpressTeam. It is in no way formal nor rigidly structured and we welcome new people every week! Some come, some goes, and then come back later. The idea is that we always have people who are constantly there for the project. And the way to “get in” is fairly easy: you want to help, raise your hand and your are in ! So if you are interested, do raise your hand

But how does that work ?

Well, we meet nearly every week, some time a few times a week, and we address a list of things we need to do. Improvments on ImpressCMS Network Sites, planing the next release, discussing security issue, basicly, getting things done ! It’s common knowledge that putting people together face to face (well, via the World Wide Web) for a small period of time regularly allows a team to sort out the last 20% that needs to be done in order to achieve a task. And this has been working very well for us in the last 10 months.

Typically, most of the product and community development happens on our forums and our meetings allow us to ensure we are not overlooking anything, and that every task has a deadline and a “flag holder”.

However, in our desire to be fully transparent to our community, we have started, since last week, to document our meetings on ImpressCMS Wiki so the community is aware of the outcome of our discussions.

Every week, we will create a new wiki page with the things that needs to be addressed this week, and will document the result of every tasks.

Ok, that’s enough for now. I don’t want to use too much of your time reading my bla-blah so I’ll stop for today and will try to find more time to blog about ImpressCMS and keep our amazing community inform of all the cool things that happen every week in our project!